Why does DDG use redirects in its results instead of direct links? And why does DDG falsely advertise their links as direct links? When you look at the status bar, the entry for www.example.com seems to link to www.example.com. Instead, it links to https://duckduckgo.com/k/?u=http://www.example.com. Not only do I find it a lie, I know for sure that it's an easy way to track a user. You just have to save all values assigned to the u variable and link them to the IP from which the HTTP request came. If you used direct links, however, you would have no way to know if a user clicked this or that result, since no server-side request would be issued. The only alternative you would have would be to use Javascript and create a cookie, and that could easily be bypassed by using the non-JS version of DDG or disabling cookies. Am I wrong? Please, understand that I'm no web developer.

I'm not inferring anything, I'm just curious. Why wouldn't you use direct links? Results optimization? Something to do with referrals? I'm no conspiracy theorist but I see no practical reason to redirect the user instead of just send him where he wants to be, aside from tracking of some kind.